24 June 2016

After Brexit, what now for the North?

I was troubled last night to read people expressing delight at
the huge queues at polling booths across the UK. Such a massive turnout,
seemingly, was a triumph for democracy. I wasn't so sure. There's far more to
democracy than just casting votes, and those who act as though democracy is
something that happens but on rare occasions and purely in the privacy of the
polling booth do a disservice to democracy.

If democracy is to mean anything
-- if our votes are to mean anything -- we have to participate in an informed
way. I was pretty sure that wasn't happening: how valuable are votes cast on
the basis of a mythical £350m a week, or to ward off Turkish accession, or in
the belief that EU laws are made by unelected bureaucrats, or that there's no
way to remove the European Commission from office, or because of the belief
that British fishing collapsed when it joined the EEC, or any of a host of
other lies?

The 'Leave' campaigners lied and lied egregiously throughout the
Brexit referendum campaign, and did so tapping into decades of popular poison
from the British press, and if lots of people who've long felt disenfranchised
and ignored should have been willing to go along with this kind of stuff, well,
maybe that should have been expected.

I've less sympathy for others, for those who take the pains to
be informed of things they care about, but who on other issues prefer instead
to listen simply to those whose political views conveniently tally with their
own judgments and to shout down calls for them to inform themselves as mere
elitism.

So for those who make much of their pro-life credentials, and
who dismissed my concerns and those of others about the
lives and livelihoods of those in Northern Ireland being actively endangered by
a vote to quit the EU, here are just a handful of things they might look before
they next put themselves forward to speak as Catholics or pro-lifers, or even
just look in the mirror.

Not for nothing has The Irish
Times said, "Of all the things that could happen to an
Irish government short of the outbreak of war, this is pretty much up there
with the worst of them."

Then there was The Guardian a couple of days back,
observing that, "Great Britain may be able to weather a Brexit, but
Northern Ireland simply cannot."

Lucinda Creighton may not be everyone's
cup of tea, but she had a point when she said the other day that, "Brexit
poses the greatest threat to the Northern Irish Peace Process since the Good
Friday Agreement was signed in 1998."

For a more cautious take, unsurprisingly from a pro-Brexit
paper, The Telegraphwarned, "The
scenario of the UK leaving the European Union, when a majority of the
population of Northern Ireland have opted to remain (and especially if there
has been a decisive vote in favour among the nationalist community), may
exacerbate tensions, fuel demands for a border poll on Irish unification and
challenge the durability of the peace process."

Then we have from the Centre on Constitutional Change the
observation that "a British exit from the EU risks undermining the
very self-determination and national sovereignty that its adherents believe it
will bring about", continuing, "This is because it risks shattering
the fragile balance and stability of the UK by threatening the peace settlement
in Northern Ireland ".

Onetime MEP Brendan Donnelly wrote from the London
School of Economics, meanwhile, that "it is clear that much potential
exists for the destabilisation of Northern Ireland through a vote to leave the
EU on 23 June", continuing, "The Good Friday agreement is under more
strain from a currently low level of sectarian violence than is sometimes
appreciated".

At the Euractiv site, Paul Brannan hammers this home when he
says, "with politics in Northern Ireland already on the brink of breakdown
and the Good Friday Agreement in jeopardy, a UK EU exit threatens a total
collapse of the peace process".

And for those who think Britain can keep the show on the road,
as though it's taken seriously as an honest broker and was never known as
'perfidious Albion', The New Statesman points out: "Funnily
enough, the same people who don't trust Britain to administer the peace process
would also be unhappy with the EU leaving that process."

I could say more, but that'll do for now. Words seem unlikely to
do any good now the die is cast.

No comments:

I flit between Ireland and England, skulking round churches, libraries, and museums, wetting my throat rather less often than I’d like, but perhaps more often than I should.
I suspect that the secret of life lies in laughter and humility, that only living things can go against the stream, that the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man, and that placed as sentinels of an unknown watch, we have a duty to whistle.
I think even more than I talk, and on good days I do so in that order.